Does government have a place in business? This is a question that I have been debating for awhile. Orderly markets require regulation, and regulation has to come from government. Too much regulation and you end up messed, too little and you end up fried. This is sort of like cooking a frog.
Now government has to figure out the rules that we all play under. Government has to not be corrupt, has to enforce the laws it puts on the books, and has to be willing to admit it when it makes a mistake. Government has to understand that it will build a set of rules and the market will mess with them till they work for the market.
Some rules, like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, have to be changed and partially discarded. The American stock exchange will get killed by SOX. The fact is, the American stock exchange has a good market-making system, a good amount of liquidity, and no ability to compete with AIM or TSX venture exchange because no one in his right mind–myself included–would willingly undertake to implement Sarbanes-Oxley, no matter how cheap the market is to access. Bankruptcy laws should make sense. Some debts should be clearable, others not so.
Other rules have to be changed and enforced. It should be a crime to knowingly give people credit when you have statistically less than a 50% chance of getting paid back. Interest rates should be capped at 24%, and that should include hard-money men and payday-loan nasties. The fact is, we need to go to some common-sense laws that take financial predators and feed them to the lions at the local zoo.
On the whole, the presidential candidate that will go through and clean this up, I will vote for. You, however, cannot, in the process of cleaning it up, make America a harder place to do business. The candidate that says we will cut 50,000 pages of regulation, cut the bankruptcy code to 10 pages, and cut the tax code to 500, will win. Let’s open America up to fair business, because until then no one in his right mind will open up new shops in the United States when there are other choices.
I fly out of the country every week. I take a domestic business trip less than one time a year. That does not make sense. We need to rebalance the U.S. government’s regulatory role to encourage, not discourage, fair business in America.
